Pietro Tenerani

Pietro Tenerani was an Italian sculptor born in 1789 at Torano, a village of quarrymen above Carrara, who became one of the leading sculptors in Rome after Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen. His art carries Neoclassical calm into the middle of the nineteenth century, with a gentler, more devotional feeling associated with the Italian Purist movement.

Life in brief

Tenerani trained at the Accademia in Carrara and went to Rome in 1814, where he entered the studio of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and became one of his most trusted assistants. Working independently from the 1820s, he received major commissions from popes, aristocrats and foreign governments. He became president of the Accademia di San Luca and director of the Capitoline Museums and other papal collections. He died in Rome in 1869.

Style

Tenerani's figures have the smooth surfaces and clear contours of Neoclassicism, but they are softer and more inward than Thorvaldsen's, often absorbed in prayer, grief or sleep. In religious work he drew on early Renaissance models, in line with the Purists who looked back to painters before Raphael.

Key works

Psyche in a Faint (Psiche svenuta), devised around 1822, shows Psyche collapsing after opening the casket of beauty she was forbidden to look into, her body sinking sideways in a long, graceful curve. It was so admired that he made several versions; one is in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. Compare Antonio Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, which shows the next moment of the story. Tenerani's public works include the funerary monument of Pope Pius VIII in St Peter's Basilica and a bronze statue of Simón Bolívar in the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá.

Where to see his work

His sculpture can be seen in St Peter's and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, in churches and palaces across Italy, and in Bogotá. See more in Greek Mythology in Art and Famous Sculptures.